After bringing up the subject with Huet, I immediately moved into action.
“Uh... pardon? What are you doing, all of a sudden?”
“Daughter? What is the matter? Uh... Lord Nemo? What brings you here?”
First, I called Eleanor Dare and Sir John White.
“Please wait just a moment. The Nautilus has not properly finished mooring yet, so... Pardon? What is that? A com...pu?”
I had to call Vicente too. He was the representative of the roughly one hundred Spaniards.
“You said you had need of me? No. All of a sudden... you hold out this square object... It opens? Ugh, the light...!”
And needless to say, Manteo, the representative of the natives.
“What is this about?”
“You said you would teach us some sort of com... something? Then of course I must go!”
On top of that, there was Huet, with whom I had first started discussing government, as well as Harriot and Bacon, both scholars and useful human resources in all sorts of places.
For now, I called everyone I had mainly been working with in this settlement. Walter Raleigh was currently in England, so these seven were all of them.
I took them straight to Croatoan Island. Then I brought them to the farm, sat them down at desks, and handed out tablets and laptops.
Two laptops my parents had used for office work, one laptop I had used as a freshman in college, one laptop I had used after graduating university, one I had used while working...
Add to that work tablets, Netflix tablets, and so on, old and new all combined, and there were twelve in total. After all, people usually did not throw away old laptops or tablets easily.
Naturally, I had formatted them all so no suspicious future materials could be found inside. Likewise, I had set all their languages to English.
“From now on... think of these as your auxiliary brains.”
At my words, Bacon suddenly raised his hand. Feeling an ominous premonition for some reason, I gave him a nod, and he asked,
“By brains, do you mean to say that man thinks not with the heart, but with the brain?”
Don’t tell me that was future knowledge too?
When I nodded with difficulty, Bacon once again pulled out his notebook and hastily scribbled something down. I ignored him and continued speaking.
“...In any case, the reason I call this an auxiliary brain is simple. It will remember things in your place, perform complicated calculations with numbers in your place, and organize materials in your place as well.”
At my words, Eleanor’s eyes went wide, and she took the tablet I held out, examining it this way and that.
At a glance, it looked like she was about to say, “Computer! Remember for me that I have to bathe Virginia tomorrow!” so I quickly moved on.
“Now... watch.”
The projector I had connected in advance began operating, and my screen appeared.
“You must properly see... what can be done with this.”
***
...Bacon could not believe the scene unfolding before his eyes.
“The average age of the initial Roanoke Island settlers is 23.3. If we exclude the minors among them...”
“Mr. Harriot? Since you seem to have understood how to use this the fastest, calculate this once. What is 24,514 times 16,435?”
“Mr. Huet? Your speed of understanding is no less impressive! Very good. Then here, I will give you random names, so automatically sort their names in alphabetical order.”
“Good! Eleanor? Uh... calculate what date it will be after 13,954 days have passed from August 13, 1377!”
Tasks that might have required someone to spend all day organizing materials were completed in an instant with only a few flicks of the fingers.
Without the slightest mistake.
Without a single moment of error.
“...”
“Mr. Bacon? Mr. Bacon!”
“Uh, ah, yes.”
“What is the average number of members in the Algonquin tribes of our settlement?”
“Ah... let me see... approximately 271.38 people.”
“Good. May I check how you wrote the function?”
“...Yes.”
He felt he understood why that person had called this an “auxiliary brain.” No, this was a machine faster, more precise, and more astonishing than a brain. This was...
“Oh, ohhh... This is a miracle...”
“That’s right. This is a miracle. Without it, how many office workers... no, angels would have suffered under menial work? With this alone, bothersome data organization and numerical calculations all become unnecessary.”
It was true.
Over the past few days, learning how to operate “this,” pressing the unfamiliar “keyboard,” and staring at this thing called a “monitor” until his eyes felt like they would fall out had been painful... but once he learned how to use it, he rather regretted not having known of such an object sooner.
“Th-this, this is... the hope of all mathematicians and astronomers! With this alone, we can be freed from all manner of dreadful calculations...!”
Harriot, too, had his hands trembling as he muttered this and that beside him. Others like Manteo and Eleanor seemed to feel this was merely a convenient tool, but they were different.
“From now on, the names, dates of birth, occupations, families, tribes, hometowns, genders, religions, dates of migration, and residences of all who immigrate to this colony will be recorded here.”
“...”
“...”
“...”
“And from now on, the area and location of the land to be allotted to them will also be organized here.”
“...”
“...”
“...”
“Then what will you be able to do with this from now on?”
What, what would they be able to do?
They could easily organize, classify, and grade the information of tens of thousands of people at every moment, and he was asking what they could do with it?
“...Everything.”
Bacon murmured so without realizing it.
***
Ugh, it was disgustingly hard.
It was only natural that Manteo could not read, and the others were people even further removed from modern civilization than grandfathers and grandmothers in their eighties in the twenty-first century.
In that sense, teaching people at a senior center how to use smartphones would be overwhelmingly lower in difficulty.
This was teaching sixteenth-century people twenty-first-century civilization. I had not thought it would be easy, but I still made the attempt.
I opened the textbook I had used when studying for the Computer Specialist in Spreadsheet & Database Level 2 exam beside me and truly taught them “from the very beginning.”
“N-no, Vicente! You must not break it! That is the power button!”
“The computer looks hot, so would it be all right to wash it with water? Eleanor, think about it. If a person’s body is hot, what would happen if you cut open their stomach and poured cold water inside?
...No. Even if it breaks, it will return to normal, but if sparks fly, it will be dangerous.”
“You said you wish to split it open and examine its structure? That is admirable curiosity, but even if you look, it will be difficult to understand anyway.
This is a machine processed so finely that it cannot be seen by human eyes... Uh, do not touch it! You will get hurt!”
In other words, “from the beginning” meant things like this.
How to hold a mouse.
The purpose of a keyboard.
The meaning of function keys.
The meaning of the desktop and the use of shortcut icons.
And so on and so forth...
“Why, why does this one not move when I press the screen? It is different from my daughter’s.”
That is because, Mr. White, your daughter is using a tablet, while you are using a laptop without a touch screen.
“Uaaaagh! The screen suddenly went black, and I can see my face! What is this...?”
That is because, Manteo, you accidentally pressed the power button.
“Th-there are people trapped inside this! We must hurry and save them!”
No. There was a video that hadn’t been deleted...!
...It was truly fortunate. These were electronic devices that would “absolutely never” break. If they had broken down, my workload would have multiplied three or fourfold.
In any case, as for the fact that nothing on the screen actually existed, and that it was merely the result of reading information abstracted in a complex manner into a certain form... naturally, I could not make them understand that.
I simply told them that everything on the screen was an illusion.
That was not all.
“Eleanor? Smile.”
“Yes?”
Click.
“Here, this is called a photograph...”
“Kyaaaah! M-my soul has been trapped here!”
“No, it has not.”
“Kyaaaah! A devil is imitating me inside the picture!”
“That is not it either.”
I could not make them understand the concept of a digital camera in a short time either. The best I could do was convince them that it was something like an extremely detailed portrait drawn very quickly.
So one can imagine how difficult it must have been to take photographs with a digital camera, move them to Excel, and store them in a table.
That’s right.
It was truly, truly hard.
But there was certainly value in having gone through all that trouble to educate those seven.
And so.
Two months passed.
“Uh... um... will this be all right? I heard talk of ghosts and souls and the like.”
“Don’t worry, madam. Do you find Lord Nemo suspicious?
Just look this way and smile for a moment, and it will all be over! One... two...!”
Click.
“Ugh, ugh, it’s dazzling.”
“Don’t worry! It’s almost all done now! Here, madam, you only need to write your name, birthday, hometown, and the names of your family members!”
“My age is twenty-one, and... my occupation... should I say housewife?”
“It’s all done! Once you go back, we will allot you a field in an appropriate place!”
“Th-thank you! In England, my dream was to farm on a proper piece of land we owned together with my husband, but like this...”
In roughly this fashion, over the course of several weeks, we secured data on approximately 11,282 people.
Even those who had been reluctant changed their attitude when told that they had to register their identities to become eligible for land distribution.
It would be difficult to do anything with this data immediately, but when building an administrative system in the future, work would become far easier. I could guarantee it.
Even dividing up the land by religion, hometown, and race did not take that long.
This was the power of electronic administration.
***
“Uh... good God.”
There is an impression of heaven that people generally imagine.
Angels dressed in white, and humans who have become like angels, drift through the sky and live amid eternal light. They praise the Lord amid everlasting glory and happiness.
Lions graze like flocks of sheep, the land flows with milk and honey, and the vast, beautiful meadows can be walked barefoot.
There, angels are beings who keep watch beside the Lord’s throne. They praise the Lord’s very existence and sing of an eternally happy life.
But... uh...
“This too is a product of heaven?”
Scroll. Scroll.
Harriot endlessly scrolled up and down, looking at the smiling faces of over a thousand people inside the Excel file.
Was there such a thing as administration in heaven too? If so, just how great and efficient must heaven’s administration be?
Moreover, the concept of a “decimal point” shown here was astonishing as well. A system that conveniently expressed numbers smaller than one in base ten instead of fractions—was it not remarkably efficient?
Beyond that, there were various mathematical symbols that conveniently organized formulas, and the ways of arranging and using such mathematical symbols.
All of it brought inspiration to Harriot as a mathematician. How much mathematical progress could be achieved from the inspiration gained from this thing called “Excel” alone?
Harriot again failed to sleep properly today. He spent the entire day fiddling with Excel... and only at dawn did he barely manage to close his eyes.
Heaven... might perhaps be a garden of mathematics.
If so, then perhaps God was the greatest mathematician.
Perhaps it might even be possible to describe the world through mathematics. If that became possible...
Ah.
Half-asleep, Harriot raised himself up, opened the laptop again, and looked into the screen.
“Things that appear on this screen are not real. Pardon? Then what are they, you ask? Hmm... a representation of encrypted information... No. Simply think of them as moving pictures that depict something. They are illusions.”
That was right. Lord Nemo had said so as well.
The world inside this laptop... might already be one expressed through mathematics.
If that was true, then perhaps this world too... such a thing might be possible!
In Harriot’s mind, something that the ancient Pythagoras had thought, and that future natural philosophers and scientists would come to think, began to surface like mad.
Unable to contain his excitement, he sprang from his seat. He spoke of his realization to Bacon, who was at least the closest thing to a scientist in this place.
A world expressed through mathematics.
As Bacon had always insisted, one must seek the truths of the world under strict and systematic experimentation.
And as Harriot had just realized, the results of such inquiry could be expressed as abstract models through the material called mathematics.
The world is a poem written in the ink of water and earth, fire and wind.
Yet the language that composes that grand poem is mathematics.
The scientific method.
Its seed, ever so slightly... began to be planted early in this land.
In this New World.
Within the conversation between Harriot and Bacon.